


Dark Charms

by Nighthaunting



Category: Warhammer - All Media Types, Warhammer 40.000
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Gen, Inspired By Tumblr, and makes predictably bad desicions, implied chaos-y-ness?, the one where russ is the sorcerer instead of magnus
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-22
Updated: 2017-02-22
Packaged: 2018-09-26 08:49:44
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 949
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9877823
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nighthaunting/pseuds/Nighthaunting
Summary: Inspired by this commentary: "A very vague AU where russ was supposed to be the super magic-y one instead of (in addition to?) magnus. look, I just want emps to be odin some days, the conman american gods version."Wherein Russ is a Sorcerer, and tries to con a conman.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [purplekitte](https://archiveofourown.org/users/purplekitte/gifts).



> sorcerer russ resents the emperor attempting to bind him, as much as the binds make him love the emperor. unlike magnus who represents all of the cerebral human-centric psychic disciplines, russ' sorcery is always always inherently grounded outside the bounds of 'humanity' in the wildness of nature. this distinction is Important, and the emperor underestimates it.

There was no breathing thing but Leman this high in the mountains. The sanyeti would not range so far up–the heavy pine forests thinning as the slopes grew ever steeper and giving them no food or shelter to seek–and likewise the wolves that hunted them would not follow to where there was no prey. Up this far, with the ice crunching under his feet and frost clinging to his furs and eyelashes and gathering in the thick braids of his hair, Leman could almost feel the snarl of threads around him ease. They did not fall away, but the starkness near the peaks of Fenris’ great jagged mountains was enough that Leman could feel small, the threads growing slack as if he lessened in their binds. Perhaps he did grow small here, moving purposefully–yet carefully–towards the peak of the mountain he climbed. 

It was, for Fenris, a small mountain; not nearly as great as the mountain of the Fang where even now builders and artisans worked to carve out the hearth-fortress of the VI. There was some distinction to it, though, in the shrine that rested near the summit. There were no mountains on Fenris that were not considered sacred, in their way–and many of them bore well-tended shrines to calm their volcanic fury or to revere their tracts of deep forest–but this shrine had been built by Leman himself, and tended by him alone since the earliest days of his understanding of reverence. It was a shrine to Fenris herself, laid out on a great flat slab of stone and sheltered by other stones so the shearing winds would not disturb it.

Reaching the shrine had been a three day journey from his hall, but Leman was not tired from the climb. Away from the attention that the new Imperium brought to him; the warriors who claimed him as their lord sight-unseen and now refused to let him leave their sight; the mourning and exultation as those who’d drunk from the cup he’d offered were buried or lived their changes; and, perhaps most importantly, the immediate memory of the Emperor, gave Leman time to consider all that had come so far in the time since the Emperor arrived. In the small hours before dawn he finally reached the piled stones and set to caring for the shrine, dusting away the snow and settling to the ground, carefully sheltering himself from the wind and laying out his offerings. 

Leman knew contemplation, and the great silence that he was afforded at this place was welcomed; even the wind’s howling seemed distant. His wyrd had come to him, and the Emperor with it. Thinking of the Emperor made the threads pull taught around him again, and his chest felt tight, and it was all he could do to force his thoughts away from the Emperor himself and onto what the Emperor had tasked him with. Leman had never thought of himself with words as others did, but he had been created to bear the word that the Emperor had used to create him. Sorcerer. Not the one the Emperor had imagined for Himself when He forged the potential for VI and began the work of nurturing it into growth, but the one He had received from fate. Leman knew what he was, and what the Emperor wanted him to become, and privately in the parts of himself that were still wholly his own he doubted such a transformation was completely possible. 

The Emperor had bade him learn, however, and so Leman had begun. Every lesson from his childhood as a human that he had set aside had been remembered, every priest’s teaching given acknowledgement; Leman could not say if he had learned any of the runes the Emperor was master of, but he knew now the shape of his own soul and each of the powers there. He had also learned, in so doing, the shape of the Emperor’s binds on him and as the first and palest light of dawn began to grey through the clouds, the threads that bound him to the Emperor–each one as fine as silk and yet irresistible as the ice-tide in helwinter–tightened again. The glow of golden light that began to crest the mountains was nothing but a reminder of being in the Emperor’s presence, and the distraction it wrought. 

He had never felt such an urge to prove himself before, to do as the Emperor wished him to unquestioningly. The desire to please Him was strange, not simply in what he felt but in the depth of his need for the Emperor to be pleased with him. One approving glance was enough to undo Leman, and even his attempts at self-control became lacking when faced with the Emperor’s mere presence. Leman offered blood and wine on the shrine to his mother world, and spoke into the wind for her to hear, and asked her guidance. Leman was charmed–and would be charmed until he could break free from the wyrd the Emperor had woven around him–but he also longed for more than what the charm gave him. He longed for the Emperor to return each scrap of love and devotion the charm drew from him. Sitting high up in the great mountains, Leman sat beside a shrine to Fenris, his mother, and stared into the bright glow of the rising sun seeing only the gold of a great man worlds away, and spoke a charm of his own.

Breathing the cold into burning lungs, he felt the thread of his own power catch, and remembered all his mother’s nature had ever taught him about weaving.

**Author's Note:**

> russis going to weave the emperor a fucking shroud


End file.
